Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (Part 6)

Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.

P. J. O'Rourke

The Tools of Sociology (Part A)

by

 Charles Lamson

 Applying the Sociological Imagination

Politicians seeking our votes are eager to tell us what to believe about social issues and what society should do about them. But often the claims and recommendations we hear are contradictory. The explanations given for such problems as suicide, for example, may suggest very different solutions. How is an informed citizen to make decisions about the causes of social conditions or what should be done to remedy them? This is where sociology comes in. Sociology brings scientific methods to bear on these debates.

Most people associate social scientific research with questionnaires, opinion surveys, and statistical reports. It is true that sociologists throughout the world use these research techniques, but they also use many other methods to explore social conditions. In the next several posts we will review many of the most common research tools used by sociologists. I will show how sociological research conforms to the rules of the scientific method and how the findings lead to changes in theories and to new research.

Anyone who embarks on scientific research, no matter what the subject or the method used, will go through many intellectual and emotional ups and downs before the work is done. Very often it will appear that the research is easy to define and conduct; soon, however, it will seem far more complicated, and the research questions themselves may appear less well defined than they did at the outset. This can be just as true in biology or chemistry as it is in sociology or another social science. Nevertheless, in all research projects certain basic steps must be completed, though not always in the order listed here:

1. Deciding on the problem. At first this may be simply a subject or topic of interest. Eventually, however, it must be worked worded in the form of a specific research question or questions in order to provide a focus for the rest of the work.
2. Reviewing the literature. Usually others have conducted research on the same topic. Find their reports and use them to determine what you can accomplish through your own research.
3. Formulating research questions. The work of others points to questions that have not been answered. Your own interest, time, resources, and available methods help determine what specific questions within your broad topic you can actually tackle.
4. Selecting a method. Different questions require different types of data, which in turn suggests different methods of data collection and analysis. Some of those methods are described in detail in this analysis.
5. Analyzing the data. Data are analyzed at each stage of the research, not just when preparing the final report.

In the next few posts we act as if this step by step procedure is always followed by researchers in the social sciences. But do not assume that this procedure can be applied to every research question. One does not always progress easily from one step to another, and often one must go back and repeat the steps. In addition, some research questions require that we devise new ways of conducting research or new combinations of existing research methods.

Formulating Research Questions

A good deal of information is required even to know what situations or events one should study in conducting research on a particular social issue. General questions about societies or social behavior have to be translated into specific questions that can be studied using observations and measures of all kinds. In his book Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897), Emile Durkheim's study of suicide provides a good example of the process by which a sociologist converts a broad question about social change into the specific questions to be addressed in an empirical study---one that gathers evidence to describe behavior and to prove or disprove explanations of why that behavior occurs. These explanations are often, but not always, stated in the form of a hypothesis, a statement that expresses an informed or educated guess regarding a possible relationship between two or more phenomena.

In his study of suicide, Durkheim challenged the intellectuals and scientists of his day. Through the presentation of verifiable statistical evidence on suicide rates in different societies, he demonstrated that he could predict where and when suicides would be more numerous. Psychological reasons might account for why a particular individual committed suicide, but Durkheim showed that "social variables" such as religion or fluctuations in economic conditions could explain differences in the number of suicides from one society or region to another.

The question that eventually led Durkheim to his empirical study of suicide actually had nothing to do with suicide. He began by thinking about the consequences of large-scale social change in Western nations. In particular, he believed that industrialization and the rapid growth of cities weaken people's attachments to their families and communities. As people became increasingly anonymous and isolated, they were more likely to engage in a variety self destructive acts, the most extreme being suicide. In Durkheim's view, the act of suicide could be explained as much by social variables like rates of marriage and divorce as by individual psychological variables like depression or despair. Thus for Durkheim the study of suicide was a way of exploring the larger concept of integration or lack of integration into society. He sought to discover whether people who are less well integrated into society (i.e., more isolated from other people) were more likely to commit suicide. 

If this view was correct, Durkheim reasoned, the rates of suicide among various populations should vary along with measures of social integration. He therefore formulated these hypotheses, among others:

• Suicide rates should be higher for unmarried people than for married people.
• Suicide rates should be higher for people without children than for people with children.
• Suicide rates should be higher for people with higher levels of education (education emphasizes individual achievement which weakens a group ties).
• Suicide rates should be higher in Protestant than in Catholic communities (protestantism places more stress on individual achievement than Catholicism does, and this in turn weakens group ties).

Each of these hypotheses specifies a relationship between two variables that can be tested---that is, proved true or false through empirical observation. In sociology, variables are characteristics of individuals, groups, or entire societies that can vary from one case to another. In the hypotheses just presented, the suicide rate is a social variable. Religion, education, marital status, and number of children are other variables in these hypotheses. The techniques Durkheim used to establish a set of hypotheses became a model for modern social scientific research. 

Let us examine one of Durkheim's classic hypotheses about suicide to see what it can teach us about applying the scientific method to social issues. In the hypothesis stating that suicide rates should be higher for unmarried people than for married people. Durkheim was proposing that there is a relationship between two variables: incidence of suicide and incidence of marriage. The suicide rate is a measure of suicide that takes into account the size of the population. So is the rate of marriage, as we will see shortly.

In this hypothesis the suicide rate is referred to as the dependent variable; it is the variable that we are trying to explain. Our hypothesis suggests that variations in the suicide rate from one nation to another depend on the influence of another variable: marriage rates in different nations. Marriage rates are refered to as the independent variable. An independent variable is a factor that the researcher believes causes changes in the dependent variable. It is independent of the variable we are trying to explain. We cannot, for example, imagine explaining variations in marriage rates in terms of changes in suicide rates.

It is necessary to be extremely careful in making statements about causality, however. All social phenomena are caused by interactions among several variables rather than by only one or two. Thus we may say that lower marriage rates are one cause of suicide in a society. We know that there are other causes as well. We will discuss the issue of causality more fully later in the analysis. 

But, clearly, the story is more complicated than that. Some people commit suicide even though they are married and loved. Today some people think about suicide as an alternative to a lingering hospital death. As Durkheim first showed a century ago, suicide can take many forms and have many causes in different societies. Since then, sociologists have argued that before anyone can develop a set of testable hypotheses about the causes of suicide or any other complex social situation or behavior, it is necessary to know a great deal about the actual experiences of the people involved. Thus even a sociologist who has never contemplated suicide or been part of a suicidal cult can attempt to see the world from the viewpoint of people in suicidal situations to find out what their daily lives are like. If they exist, such studies are usually the first ones consulted when the sociologist begins to conduct research on a particular problem.

Reviewing the Literature

Perhaps the insights one would need to understand the issues surrounding suicide are already available in "the literature"---in existing books or journal articles, published statistics, photos, and other materials. There is no need to conduct new research if the answers sought are already available. Most sociological research therefore begins in the library with a "review of the literature." 

To stimulate our sociological imagination about suicide or any other social phenomenon, we need to look at a variety of studies that deal with this issue. But it takes some imagination just to think of the kinds of studies to look for. The various sociological perspectives described in an earlier post can help organize the search, especially when the perspectives are framed as questions.

Who? How many? Where? Who are we talking about and where are they? This is a way of phrasing the ecological perspective, which suggests why that perspective is helpful in beginning research on an issue. In researching almost any subject involving human behavior, it is helpful to ask who is involved and in what numbers, and where the behavior in question occurs. The ecological perspective (see parts four and five) leads to two types of studies: community studies and demographic studies.

Community studies are among the richest research traditions in sociology. They portray the typical day-to-day life of a particular population. An example of a community study of a suicidal group is John R. Hall's Gone From the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (1987). Hall was not a member of the infamous People's Temple, but he had lived in several communes and religious communities, where he collected firsthand accounts of what it is like to be a part of an intense community such as the one led by Jim Jones. If a student wanted to explore what led members of the Heaven's Gate Community to commit mass suicide in March 1997, Hall's study would be an excellent resource for ideas and comparisons. A search of the literature on the Heaven's Gate suicide would also turn up many firsthand accounts about what it is like to live among people who are obsessed with extraterrestrials and UFOs.

Demographic studies are also useful in studying the magnitude of a major social phenomenon such as suicide. Such studies provide counts of people in various relevant population categories---in this case, people who are isolated in one way or another, or who have actually attempted or succeeded in committing suicide, or who may be considering assisted suicide because of advanced illness. Demographic studies of suicide offer a wealth of information about this drastic behavior from nations throughout the world.

How Is the Situation Defined? Interactionist approaches to extreme phenomena such as suicide tend to look at how people who decide to take their own lives actually perceive their situation and how their interactions with others influence their behavior. In the case of suicide such studies are not common, but sociological research can often draw firsthand accounts. This is especially true of sensational suicides like the Heaven's Gate case. Since the 1997 mass suicide there have been numerous testimonials by former cult members describing how followers surrender their personal autonomy to the will of the leader and accept the leader's extreme definition of the situation. For the Heaven's Gate cult, the definition of the situation was that all who killed themselves would be immediately transported to a better existence among the superior beings accompanying the Hale-Bopp Comet. In fact, it was possible to follow the development of the deadly cult's beliefs on the Internet, which was also used to recruit new members.

What Groups or Organizations are Involved? This question stems from the functionalist perspective. It asks how society is organized to deal with a social issue or problem. Functionalist sociologists are concerned with how social policies actually function, as opposed to how they are supposed to function. Studies of social interventions to prevent suicide, for example, would describe how community crisis hotlines are established and who operates them, and ideally would include some measures of how effective they are. These measures might include how many calls are received and the nature of the calls (actual suicide threats, people in need of counseling, parents or guardians of possible teenage suicides, and so on). There might also be some description of how many times the potential suicide victim was saved through the actual intervention of crisis center personnel.

What Difference Does Power Make? This question arises from the conflict perspective. Studies that take a conflict approach to suicide would be likely to compare suicide rates for men and women around the world.

For any research subject, if you ask questions about who and where and how people interact, what organizations and policies guide their actions, and who has the power, you will be well on your way toward a thorough review of what is known about the issue you plan to study. 

*SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 28-33*

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Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (Part 5))

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

W. H. Auden

Sociology: An Introduction

(Part E)

 by

 Charles Lamson

Major Sociological Perspectives

Sociological perspectives are sets of ideas and theories that sociologists use in attempting to understand various problems of human society, such as the problem of population size, the problem of conflict between populations, the problem of how people become part of a society, and other issues that we will encounter throughout this analysis. Although human ecology (a study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments) remains an important sociological perspective, it is by no means the only one employed by modern sociologists. Other perspectives, to which we now turn, guide empirical description and help explain social stability and social change. 

Interactionism

Interactionism is the sociological perspective that views social order and social change as resulting from all the immense variety of repeated interactions among individuals and groups. Families, committees, corporations, armies, entire societies---indeed, all the social forms we can think of are a result of interpersonal behavior in which people communicate, give and take, share, compete, and so on. If there were no exchange of goods, information, love, and all the rest---that is, if there were no interaction among people obviously there could be no social life at all.

The interactionist perspective usually generates analyses of social life at the level of interpersonal relationships, but it does not limit itself to that micro level of social reality. It also looks at how middle and macro-level phenomena result from micro-level behaviors or, conversely, how middle- and macro-level influences shape the interactions among individuals. From the interactionist perspective, for example, a family is a product of interactions among the set of individuals who defined themselves as family members. But each person's understanding of how a family ought to behave is a product of middle- and macro-level forces: religious teachings about family life, laws dealing with education or child support, and so on. And these are always changing. You may have experienced the consequences of changing values that cause older and younger family members to feel differently about such issues as whether a couple should live together before marrying. In sum, the interactionist perspective insists that we look carefully at how individuals interact, how they interpret their own and other people's actions, and the consequences of those actions for the larger social group.

The general framework of interactionism contains at least two major and quite different sets of issues. One set concerns the problems of exchange and choice: How can social order exist and groups or societies maintain stability when people have selfish motives or being in groups---that is, when they are seeking to gain as much personal advantage as they can? The second set of issues involves how people actually manage to communicate their values and how they arrive at mutual understandings. Research and explanations of the first problem fall under the heading of "rational choice" (or exchange theory), while the second issue is addressed by the study of "symbolic interaction." In recent years these two areas of inquiry have emerged as quite different yet increasingly related aspects of the study of interaction.

Rational Choice: The Sociological View

Adam Smith, whose famous work The Wealth of Nations (1776) became the basis for most subsequent economic thought, believed that individuals always seek to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. If over time they are allowed to make the best possible choices for themselves, they will also produce an affluent and just society. They will serve others, even when they are unaware that they are doing so, in order to increase their own benefit. They will choose a constitution and government that protect their property and their right to engage in trade. They will seek the government's protections against those who would infringe on their rights or attempt to dominate them, but the government need do little more than protect them and allow them to make choices based on their own reasoning.

You may have already encountered this theory, known as utilitarianism, in an economic or political science course. In sociology it is applied to a variety of issues. Often this rational choice view of interaction is referred to as exchange theory because it focuses on what people seem to be getting out of their interactions and what they in turn are contributing to the relationship or to the larger group. In every interaction something is being exchanged. It may be time or attention, friendship, material values (e.g., wages or possessions), or less calculated values such as esteem or allegiance. The larger the number of interacting members, the more complex the types of exchanges that occur among them. When people perceive an interaction as being one way, they begin to feel that they are being exploited or treated unfairly and will usually leave the relationship or quit the group. In industry, for example, if workers feel that they are not being paid enough for their work, they may form a union, bargain collectively with the bosses, or even go on strike. But in doing so each worker will weigh potential benefits against potential losses---losses in pay, in esteem, in friendship, and so forth. The choices are not always easy, nor are the motivations always obvious. When many values are involved, the rational calculation of benefits and costs becomes even more difficult.

Rational-choice models of behavior prompt us to look at patterns of behavior to see how they conform to and depart from normal expectations of personal profit and loss. But those models do not always identify the underlying values. How we can learn what to value in the first place, how we communicate our choices and intentions, how we learn new values through interaction---all are subjects that require other concepts besides those found in rational-choice theory of behavior. Such questions lead us toward research about how human interaction is usually carried out and understood by people and their daily lives.

Symbolic Interactionism When we make choices about our interactions with other people, we may be said to be acting rationally. But there are likely to be other forces shaping our behavior as well. Our choices tell other people about us: what we like, what we want to become, and so on. Indeed, the way people dress, the way they carry themselves (body language), the way they speak to each other, and the gestures they make convey a great deal of information that is not always intentional or expressed in speech. Some forms of communication give information without speaking it, or speak one thing and mean another. But words are of great importance too, and the content of communication is made explicit in words and sentences. Socialists refer to all these aspects of behavior as symbolic interaction. From the symbolic interactionist perspective, society itself tends to be seen as a mosaic of little scenes and dramas in which people make indications to themselves and others, respond to those indications, align their actions, and so build identities and social structures.

Symbolic interactionists call attention to how social life is "constructed" through the mundane acts of social communication. For example, in all the choices people make---their joining of friendship groups, their learning of the informal rules, their challenging and breaking all those rules---the social order, or culture, is actually "constructed." Erving Goffman, whose work was mentioned in an earlier post, is known for his research on those processes. Goffman applied the symbolic interactionist perspective in the study of everyday interactions such as rituals of greeting and departure, of daily life in asylums and gambling houses, and of behavior in the streets and public places. His work examines how people behave in social situations and how their "performances" are rated by others.

The power of symbolic interactionism lies in its ability to generate theories about how people learn to play certain roles and how those roles are used in the social construction of groups and organizations. However, if we want to think sociologically about more complex phenomena, such as the rise of bureaucratic organizations or the reasons why some societies experienced revolutions, we also need the concepts developed by two other perspectives: functionalism and conflict theory.

Functionalism

Is society simply the sum total of countless micro-level exchanges and communicative interactions, or do organizations within a society have properties independent of the actions of individuals? When we speak of the family, the army, the corporation, or the laboratory, we generally have in mind an entity marked by certain specific functions, tasks, and types of behavior. The army requires that its members learn to engage in armed combat, even if that is not what they will be doing most of the time. The family requires that its members behave in nurturerent ways toward one another. The farm requires that those who run it know how to plant and harvest. Individual interactions may determine how well a given person performs these various tasks. But it is the larger organization---the army, the family, the farm that establishes specific ways of behaving, of doing the work of that organization, which the individual must master. In this sense the organization, which exists longer than any of its members, has its own existence.

The functionalist perspective also asks how society manages to carry out the functions it must perform in order to defend itself against attackers, produce the next generation, and so on. From this perspective the many groups and organizations that make up a society form the structure of human society. The social structure is a complex system designed to carry out the essential functions of human life. The functions of the family, for example, is to raise and train a new generation to replace the old; the function of the military is to defend the society; the function of schools is to teach the next generation the beliefs and skills they will need to maintain the society in the future; and a major function of religion is to develop shared ideas of morality.

When a society is functioning well, all its major parts are said to be well integrated and in equilibrium. But periods of rapid social change can throw social structures out of equilibrium. Entire ways of life can lose their purpose or function. When that happens, the various structures of society can become poorly integrated, and what were formerly useful functions can become dysfunctional.

Consider an example in agrarian societies, in which most people work the land, families typically include three generations, with many members in each generation living close to one another. Labor is in great demand; many hands are needed where there are no machines to perform work in fields and barnyards and granaries. The emphasis on early marriage and large numbers of children found in the agrarian family is highly functional for such a society. But when the society industrializes and its agriculture becomes mechanized, families may continue to produce large numbers of children even though the demand for farmlands has decreased. When they grow up, those children may migrate to towns and cities. The migrants are likely to continue to value large families and to have numerous children, but if there are a limited number of jobs in the cities, they may join the ranks of the unemployed and their children may grow up in poverty. In this situation the family can be said to be poorly integrated with the needs of the society; the value of large family size has become dysfunctional: It no longer contributes to the well-being of groups or individuals.

Conflict Theory

A major flaw in the functionalist perspective is the fact that we have rarely seen anything approaching equilibrium in human societies. Conflict and strife appear to be as basic to society as harmony, integration, and smooth functioning. In the 20th century alone, two world wars and many civil wars disrupted the lives of millions of people. Almost as devastating was the Great Depression of the 1930s, the most severe economic slump in modern history. Worst of all were the nightmares of the Nazi Holocaust and the purges of Stalinist Russia, in which more than 20 million people were exterminated.

The world wars, the depression, and the Holocaust shocked and demoralized the entire world. They also called into question the optimism of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social philosophers, many of whom believed in the promise of progress through modern science and technology. Between 1914 and the end of World War II, modern ideas and technologies were used for horrible purposes often enough to disillusion all but the most ardent optimists. Bewildered intellectuals and political leaders turned to sociology to find some explanation for those horrors.

One explanation was provided by Marxian theory. According to Marx, the cause of conflict in modern times could be found in the rise of capitalism. Under capitalism, forms of exploitation and domination domination spread. For example, in the early period of industrial capitalism, workers were forced to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week; in less developed areas of the world, large populations were virtually enslaved by the new colonial powers.

At the heart of capitalism, for Marx, is conflict among people in different economic classes, especially between those who control wealth and power and those who do not. Marx argued that the division of people in a society into different classes, defined by how they make a living, always produces conflict. Under capitalism this conflict occurs between the owners of factories and the workers. Marx believed that class conflict would eventually destroy or at least vastly modify capitalism. His theory is at the heart of what has come to be known as conflict theory or the conflict perspective.

In the 1960s, when protests against racism and segregation, the Vietnam War, pollution of the environment, and discrimination against women each became the focus of a major social movement, the conflict perspective became more prominent. It clearly was not possible to explain the rapid appearance of major social movements with theories that emphasized how the social system would function if it were in a state of equilibrium. Even Marxian theory did not do a very good job of predicting the protest movements of the 1960s or their effects on American society. The environmental movement and the women's movement, for example, were not based on economic inequalities alone, nor were the people who joined them necessarily exploited workers. Sociologists studying the role of conflict in social change therefore had to go beyond the Marxian view. Many turn to the writings of the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who argued that conflict is necessary as a basis for the formation of alliances. According to Simmel, conflict is one means whereby a "web of group affiliations" is constructed. The continual shifting of alliances within this web of social groups can help explain who becomes involved in social movements and how much power those movements are able to acquire.

The concept of power holds a central place in conflict theory. From the functionalist perspective society holds together because its members share the same basic beliefs about how people should behave. Conflict theorists point out that the role of power is just as important as the influence of shared beliefs in explaining why society does not disintegrate into chaos. Power is the ability of an individual or group to change the behavior of others. A nation's government, as we will see in a later post, usually controls the use of force (a form of power) to maintain social order. For sociologists who study conflict and power, the important questions are who benefits from the exercise of power and who loses. For example, when the government intervenes in a strike and obliges workers to return to their jobs, does the public at large or the corporation against which the workers were striking benefit most? And what about the workers themselves? What do they gain or lose? Such questions are Central to conflict theory today.

The Multi-Dimensional View of Society

Each of the sociological perspectives leads to different questions and different kinds of observations. These are extremely powerful analytical tools. Anyone that masters them and learns to apply them in appropriate ways will have an immense advantage over more naive observers of the ever-changing parade of social life. From the ecological perspective come questions about how populations can exist and flourish in various natural and social environments. From the interactionist perspective come questions about how people get along and behave in groups and organizations of all kinds. Functionalism asks questions about how society is structured and how it works as a social system. And the conflict perspective asks how power is used to maintain order and how conflict changes society. These different perspectives developed as sociologists asked different questions about society. In contemporary sociology each continues to stimulate relatively distinct research based on the types of questions being asked. Yet a great deal of research combines the insights of different perspectives in ways that vastly increase the power of the resulting analysis.  

*SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 13-19*

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Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (Part 4)

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Toni Morrison

Sociology: an Introduction

(Part D)

 by

 Charles Lamson

The Rise of Modern Sociology

We credit the European social thinkers and philosophers with creating sociology, but nowhere did the new science find more fertile ground for development than in North America. By the beginning of the 20th century, sociology was rapidly acquiring new adherents in the United States and Canada, partly because of the influence of European sociologists like Marx and Durkheim, but even more because of the rapid social changes occurring in North America at the time. Waves of immigrants to cities and towns, the explosive growth of population and industry in the cities, race riots, strikes and labor strife, moral crusades against crime and vice and alcohol, the demand for woman suffrage---these and many other changes caused American sociology to take a new turn. There was an increasing demand for knowledge about exactly what changes were occurring and who was affected by them. In North America, therefore, sociologists began to emphasize the quest for facts about changing social conditions that is, the empirical investigation of social issues.

Empirical information refers to carefully gathered, unbiased data regarding social conditions and behavior. In general, modern sociology is distinguished by its relentless and systematic search for empirical data to answer questions about society. Journalists, for example, also seek the facts about social conditions, but they must cover many different events and situations and present them as "stories" that will attract their readers' interest. Because they usually cannot dwell on one subject very long, journalists often must content themselves with citing examples and quoting experts whose opinions may or may not be based on empirical evidence. In contrast, sociologists study a situation or phenomenon in more depth. And when they do not have enough facts they are likely to say, "That is an empirical question. Let's see what the research tells us, and if the answers are inconclusive we'll do more research." Evidence based on measurable effects and outcomes is required before one can make an informed decision about an issue. 

To use the sociological imagination to ask relevant questions and to seek answers to those questions backed by evidence that can be verified by others are among the chief goals of modern sociology. Anyone can make assertions about society or about why people behave the way they do. "I think it's human nature to act selfishly, no matter what kind of education people have" is a common assertion that is not backed up by any solid evidence. As you read this ongoing series of blog posts you will learn that to strengthen your sociological imagination you must learn how to apply evidence to your views and admit that your opinions can be modified by that evidence.

The Social Surveys The empirical focus of American sociology began largely as an outgrowth of the reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during this period. The nation had not yet recovered from the havoc created by the Civil War. Southern blacks were migrating to the more industrialized North in ever increasing numbers, and at the same time millions of European immigrants were finding ill-paying jobs in the larger cities, where cheap labor was in great demand. By the turn of the 20th century, therefore, the nation's cities were crowded with poor families for whom the promise of gold in America had become a tarnished dream. In this time of rapid social change, Americans continually debated the merits of social reform and proposed new solutions for pressing social issues. Some called for socialism, others for a return to the free market, or a ban on labor organizations, or an end to immigration, or the removal of black Americans to Africa. But where would the facts to be used in judging those ideas come from?

In order to gain empirical information about social conditions, dedicated individuals undertook numerous "social surveys." Jacob Riis's (1890) account of life on New York's Lower East Side; W.E.B. Dubois's (1967/1899) survey of Philadelphia blacks; Emily Balch's 1910 depiction of living conditions among Slavic miners and steelworkers in the Pittsburgh area; and Jane Addams's famous Whole House Maps and Papers (1895), which described the lives of her neighbors in Chicago's West Side slum area---these and other carefully documented surveys of the living conditions of people experiencing the effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization left an enduring mark on American sociology. Du Bois, the first black sociologist to gain worldwide recognition, helped direct sociological research to racial and social issues in minority communities using empirical data to provide an objective account of the dismal social conditions of northern blacks in the turn of the century.

The Chicago School and Human Ecology By the late 1920s the United States had become the world leader in sociology. The two great centers of American sociological research were the University of Chicago and Columbia University. At these universities and others influenced by them, two distinct approaches to the study of society evolved. The Chicago School emphasized the relationship between the individual and society, whereas the major East Coast universities, which were more strongly influenced by European sociology, tended toward macro level analysis of social structure and change.

The sociology department at the University of Chicago (the oldest in the nation) extended its influence to many other universities, especially in the Midwest, South, and West. At that time the department was under the leadership of Robert Park and his younger colleague Ernest Burgess. Park in particular is associated with the Chicago School. His main contribution was to develop an agenda for sociological research that use the city as a "social laboratory." Park favored an approach in which facts concerning what was actually occurring among people and their local communities at the micro and and middle levels would be collected within a broader theoretical framework. That framework attempted to link macro-level changes in society, such as industrialization and the growth of urban populations, to patterns of settlement and cities and to how people actually lived in cities. 

In one of his essays on this subject, Park began the with the idea that industrialization causes the breakdown of traditional "primary group" attachments (those of family members, age-mates, or clans). after stating the probable relationship between the effects of industrialization and high rates of crime, Park asked several specific questions:

What is the effect of ownership of property on truancy, on divorce, and on crime? In what regions and classes are certain kinds of crime endemic? In what classes does divorce occur most frequently? What is the difference in this respect between farmers and, say actors?

To what extent in any given ethnic group do parents and children live in the same world, speak the same language, and share the same ideas, and how far do the conditions found account for juvenile delinquency in that particular group?

This set of research questions, of which those quoted here are a small sample, inspired and shaped the work of hundreds of sociologists who were influenced by The Chicago School. To this day Chicago remains the most systemically studied city in the United States, although similar research has been carried out in other large cities throughout the nation. From studies of the linguistic diversity of African peoples to attempts to understand the subtle negotiations by which youth gangs divide up an urban "turf," the insights of The Chicago School remain a vital aspect of contemporary sociology.

As you can see from the types of questions Park asked, the distinctive orientation of the Chicago School was its emphasis on the relationships among social order, social disorganization, and the distribution of populations in space and time. Park and `Burgess called this approach human ecology. With many modifications, it remains an important, though not dominant, perspective in contemporary sociology.

Human ecology, as Park and others defined it, is the branch of sociology that is concerned with population growth and change. In particular, it seeks to discover how populations organize themselves to survive and prosper. Human ecologists are interested in how groups that are organized in different ways compete and cooperate. They also look for forms of social organization that may emerge as a group adjusts to life in new surroundings.

A key concept for human ecologists is community. There are many ways of defining this term, just as there are many ways of defining most of essential concepts sociology. From an ecological perspective, however, the term community usually refers to a population that carries out major life functions (e.g., birth, marriage, death) within a particular territory. Human ecology does not assume that there will ever be a steady state or an end to the process of change and human communities. Instead, it attempts to trace the change and document its consequences for the social environment. What happens when newcomers "invade" a community? In what way are local gangs a response to recent changes in population or in the ability of members of a community to compete for jobs? Not only do populations change, but people's preferences and behaviors also continually change. So do the technologies for producing the goods and services we want. As a result, our ways of making a living, our modes of transportation, and our choice of leisure activities create constant change, not just in communities but in entire societies. 

The Chicago School became known for this ecological approach, the idea that the study of human society should begin with empirical questions about population size, the distribution of population over territories and the like. The human ecologists recognized that society is shaped by many other processes, but their most important contribution to the discipline of sociology was to include the processes by which populations change and communities are formed.

Modern ecological theories also consider the relations between humans and their natural environment. We will see that the way people earn a living, the resources they use, the energy they consume, and their efforts to control pollution all have far-reaching consequences not only for their own lives but also for the society in which they live. These patterns of use and consumption also have an increasing impact on the entire planet---so much so that ecological problems are becoming an evermore important area of sociological research.

*SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 10-13*

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